Obama’s Top Adviser Stays Strong in a Storm of Intransigence

Jarrett, President Obama’s senior adviser and the woman who an administration source once told The New York Times was “the single, most influential person in the Obama White House,” recently joined some of my columnist colleagues and me for dinner in the nation’s capital.

Even though she didn’t discuss it, I couldn’t help but imagine how tough Jarrett’s job must be these days.

She does, after all, have to help the president work with a Congress that is so threatened by him and the demographic future that he represents that it would rather drag this country down if it means keeping it mired in the past.

No matter if that past holds hard lessons even for them.

Each day, the likelihood that the Republican-controlled House will cause the government to shut down on Oct. 1, grows. It is refusing to approve a federal spending bill unless the White House caves to their demands to strip Obamacare funding from it.

To them, it matters not that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land now, nor that the highest court in the land upheld its constitutionality, nor that Obama won, and they lost, on that issue.

No.

They’d rather keep up their tantrum to stop Obama’s signature piece of legislature; they’d rather bang their heads bloody against the floor than allow the president to get the credit for attempting to fix a health care system that is, at least by the standards of most of the developed world, broken.

Also worsening the situation is the fact that these intransigent Republicans don’t care whether a shutdown causes federal workers to be furloughed, or military checks to be delayed, or our already lackluster economic recovery to languish even more.

Nor does it matter to them that a shutdown can wind up costing the taxpayers they claim to have such fealty to; it will cost millions to restart federal functions once the standoff is resolved. Or that, according to the Congressional Research Service, the health care act will likely still be implemented even in the event of a shutdown.

These folks don’t hew to facts or practicality – or to their own history.